Utopia
by Kaguya 2.0
Summary: In a string of fragmented memories, Andrew remembers the human he loved. Warning: expect repetition, tangents that lead to nowhere, and rambling in non-linear fashion. Rated M for adult content.
1. One

_A/N: Well, this story is a bit different from my usual, in both format and subject matter. I'll continue to add new fragments as I finish them. Hope you enjoy. xx_

* * *

She was so beautiful as she bucked against me: an apotheosis of hot, kicking life. I clutched her by the thighs, pulled her close, and held her through her shudder and cry—and when she returned to herself, a lustre of sweat on her smiling face, I pressed my hand between her breasts and relished the power of her pounding heart. Words I'd never uttered before flew out, like a gasp:

"Oh, my sweetheart!"

...Eh? What's "apotheosis," you ask? Why, it's the highest expression of an ideal. I suppose they didn't teach you many pretty words like that? The bastards thought you wouldn't ever need them, did they?... Nevermind, it's all right. Etymologially, it's Greek, of course... "apotheosis" is the nominative case, and the genitive is... What's that?... You want me to go on?

Anyway, anyway...

The beloved laced her delicate fingers through mine and let out a luxurious sigh. "And what about _you_... Andrew, was it?" Her little breasts trembled as she laughed. Oh, the mischief in her eyes! "What do want from me?"

I sidled up beside her, barely able to hold in my excitement. "Sing something," I said.

"Sing?" She furrowed her black eyebrows at me. "Just sing?"

"Just sing."

"Here?"

"Of course."

"What the hell?" She scrutinized my face. A few moments dragged by in silence—and, just when I feared she'd get up to leave, her expression lightened, she took a deep breath, and began to coo a little melody in her native tongue, lilting and soft.

Unable to believe my luck, I lay my own head beside hers on the pallet. Her loveliness washed over me like the drape of her dark hair across my chest. Like waves.

A burst of flapping cut her off mid-song. We craned our necks toward the window, where a bright blue peacock perched gripping the sill in its claws. Head bobbing, it regarded us with black and earnest pearl-shaped eyes.

That's right, friend: an actual goddamned peacock.

When I was young, life was a series of pleasures small and great.

The afternoon flowed on into eternity, or so it seemed at an age when we still had all the time in the world.

Oh, I'm sorry... That look on your face... Have I told you this story before?


	2. Two

You're right. I left out a detail: what became of the peacock. I'll never forget the sight of that hand reaching toward its neck, and the bird being pulled backwards... and a second hand prying its claws from the sill with callous precision... No, we didn't see what happened next. We only heard its final squawk: such a sad and ugly sound from such a lovely creature.

You've never beheld one, have you? Not even a picture? Well, I'd suppose not.

I ran to the window and the woman, nude and flushed, followed. When we looked down, there was the poor bird splayed out dead on the sand, and crouching next to it the child who had twisted its neck.

"Little boy," I said, "what have you done?"

The boy just looked up at me, smiling. I couldn't comprehend that smile. It was cold—not from the world I knew.

I turned to the woman for help. "What on earth did he kill it for?" I said. "It was beautiful."

My darling gave me a reproachful glance. "You Neo Arcadians can't understand," she said, and I was frightened by the change that came over her: she looked old just then, as ancient as humanity itself. "To hungry people, it's more beautiful dead and cooked."

Her face went pale, and she shivered. I realized then how thin she was. I covered her with the sleeve of my robe—and I opened my mouth, ready to say something rash: _"come back with me... to a good place... a place where humans don't go hungry... I beg you, let me take care of you and make you happy..."_ -but she suddenly squeezed her fingers around my arms and let out a low howl.

"Oh, Andrew," she said, "those local men you saw at the harbor that night, listening to me sing... with money in their hands... Did you really think they like me for my singing voice?"


	3. Three

My generation was the first to be built without a predetermined function. Our starry-eyed creators, human and reploid, told us to find ourselves. Innocent beings in a new world, untouched by the horrors of the old, we set out to claim our birthright as children of X: a free and happy life.

No... they weren't like _your_ first days, or our young comrades', when no sooner had you opened your eyes than you were hauled off to your spot on the factory line, or your barracks, or to the hole you were supposed to dig, without receiving even so much as a "welcome—glad you're here." Even in _my_ time, when we had names, and a life was _worth_ something, by God, it was still a shock the way the world rushed up to meet us all at once—and so we spent our first months in pastel-painted facilities among gentle souls who eased our transition into life, answered our questions and calmed our fears.

...Such as the sublime terror of my bunkmate who, after learning the probable size of the universe, stayed awake screaming all night.

"Hey, it's all right," repeated the firm and soothing voice of one of our human caregivers from below my mattress.

"But it's so vast... so vast..." Oh, how wonderful were the things we were afraid of then!

"So it is, friend. There, there..." Through the darkness, I heard them clasp in a brotherly embrace. And, believe it or not, I didn't think it was at all strange.

Shall we weep together, you and I?... Me for the paradise I've known and lost, and you for the paradise you were meant for but can scarce imagine?

...Got to go now, do you? A mission? It's going to be dangerous? Well, when you return—no, _no_ , don't say "if," say "when"... always say "when"!...

 _When_ you return, if you need me, I'll be waiting.

...By the way, don't tell Miss Ciel about the peacock and what led up to it, mind. She's at too tender a human age still for stories like that.


	4. Four

Determined to see the world beyond our dome, I joined the merchant navy and was assigned to a deck crew of like-minded, wide-eyed fledglings.

Older and wiser people than us, who'd once come to our city to escape the desolation outside, warned us we'd find nothing beautiful there. Mostly, they were right. Pole to pole, from port and starboard we saw the ruined remnants of cities: charred and bombed-out buildings whose hollows stared out at us like vacant eyes, and houses buckling under sagging roofs choked with dust.

Infants as we were then, swaddled, unacquainted with fear, what we saw was beyond our capacity to comprehend. Whether the fires that burned up our world had raged twenty years ago, or ten thousand, made no difference to us. To tell the truth, the older I get the sadder those images make me. Time moves in but one direction—away from the past—but the heart moves with equal strength wherever it likes.

Still, amid all that dry and yellow waste tenacious scraps of human life held on: thin naked children, sunburned men, hard and stoical women, huddled together in the last remaining enclaves where something green might grow. They pieced together villages from blocks of concrete rubble and corrugated iron, while behind them loomed the grey collapsing skylines of a civilization few of them were old enough to remember.

Whenever they spied the approach of our vessel, they rushed to the shore shouting and waving their arms. The medicines and simple necessities we brought with us made their lives a little longer and more bearable; in return they brought pearls, or phosphate, or whatever else our city wanted which their hardscrabble existence had little use for, to the beach before the ship. We boxed them up, piled them into our shipping crates, and went on our way without a backward glance.

We regarded those people with wonderment, like long-lost treasures pulled up from the deep. We handled them like treasures, too: delicately, gloved by our pity. In all my years traversing the starving wilds of the world, my love for its inhabitants had been broad but shallow... Until one wind-beaten night when the moon was full, and we pulled into one particular ramshackle little harbor...

Our ship found its mooring, and I, at last, was about to find mine.


	5. Five

Was it the way the wind whipped at the palms? The creak and groan of their swaying trunks, or the "shh-shh" of their infuriated fronds, which was just like the "shh-shh" of the waves crashing against the dock beneath her feet? Or the thrashing of her hair, one moment flung back from her face, the next coiling like ardent snakes around her lithe long arms? Or was it the song itself, sweet and dark, apportioning words to the mute roar of the wind and sea, fashioning a world out of chaos?

The last of the crates had been carried onto the ship and stowed, and most of the crew below deck tucked into their charge pods. The anchor was lifted, the ship began to pull away from the harbor, and I took up my post for the middle watch... and everything had been as usual, everything had been _fine_ , until that damn woman came to the dock and began to sing.

Here were the beautiful things I loved, but from _her_ mouth, in _her_ words, embodied in _her_... and the wind and sea would never again sound the same... I'd never again behold a palm as just a palm and not the mimicked majesty of her wind-whipped hair... and suddenly my world was nobler and more courageous...

But the vision, soon as I saw it, began to shrink behind the stern, and her song was already fading into the wind. Soon it would be gone, unless, unless...

My God, what was happening to me?

* * *

"What do I do?" I said in my first week of life, when the time ahead of me seemed like a container needing to be filled up. Can you imagine? All that freedom... and I was frightened!

"My advice? Love something," said the technician who'd crafted my eyes. "But what that _something_ is... you'll have to find it for yourself. Now, here's the important part: when you find it, love it _fiercely_."

Keen but lost, I spent my early years in unvexed moderation. But that night, when the moon was full and the wind carried _her_ song to me over the waves—oh, help me—I couldn't even endure the few minutes it would have cost me to lower a lifeboat into the water and row for shore.

I jumped.

That's how my ten-year career as a sailor, which had once brought me joy, came to a screeching halt.


	6. Six

Did I tell you it was a gentle era? So gentle that, when my shipmates pulled into the harbor the next morning to retrieve me—after a whole night retracing their course, bent over the railings and beaming torches down at the waves, fearing I'd fallen overboard—they didn't order discipline. No—instead, our captian commanded everyone onto the beach to _embrace_ me. And after they had filed past and each had told me how happy he was I was alive, I entertained them with the story of my _accidental_ plunge, heroic swim toward shore, and shelter for the night in the hut of a kindly native.

...Which was just enough time for my beloved to creep up the ramp and settle into one of the crates below deck without anyone taking notice.

* * *

I had warned her she would have to stay silent until I could visit her at nightfall. She had some water, and a little food, and had told me not to worry. But when at last the hour came when I saw my chance to abandon my post, I discovered one of my shipmates had beaten me to the hold. He was peering into an opened crate, and the woman was screaming at him to close it.

"I... came to put a bundle of ropes away," my mate said, dumbfounded, "and I heard a sneeze.

"I'll go tell the captain to turn the ship around. We'll take her home..."

"I'm not going back there," said the woman's voice. "I already told you. Leave me!"

I looked into the crate, and when she saw me she gasped with relief. I gasped too. She was regal even perched on a bed of green bananas, and through her frail thinness shining with vitality and life. And her eyes said, "help me, Andrew."

"She's a refugee," I said.

"A refugee?" My mate looked thoughtful, and he turned back to the woman. "Well, we don't mind taking in refugees—especially young and fertile humans like yourself. But, miss, when we arrive you're going to need to spend a few months in quarantine first. Humanity's on the brink, you see. One epidemic brought in from the outside and..."

"She's not going to quarantine." I'd already decided. To merely survive, she'd spent half of her nineteen years a slave to one man or another. She wasn't going to spend six months more of it confined behind a glass wall. As soon as we pulled into port, she was going to be _free_.

"But, Andrew..." My mate gave me a sidelong look. Perhaps he was wondering if my fall into the sea had damaged my brain. "We have to follow the proper procedures. They're there for very good reason..."

His good and honest eyes beseeched me. I knew he wasn't going to change his mind. In fact, he was probably going to shout for help at any second.

So I pushed him against the crate, encased his neck in my hands, and squeezed with all my strength.

"Tell another soul about her and I'll throw you overboard," I said.

He answered: a low, drowning gurgle, a strained nod of the head, the fear in his bulging eyes.

It was enough. I let go.

Together my crewmates and I for ten years had weathered squalls, cut our vessel out of Arctic ice, and braved inlets flanked by craggy shallows. I had loved them, once. _Still_ loved them.

But I meant every word of that threat, and he never told a soul.

* * *

At the end of our voyage, after all the crates had been removed from the hold, I remained behind to mop—a duty which I had volunteered to the captain to undertake because of all the trouble I'd caused. And also so that, my work only half-finished, I could guide the woman from her final hiding place behind a few large coils of rope, up, up, quickly, onto the deck and into the sunlight, to be nuzzled by the mild and sweet-smelling air beneath our dome, under the startled gaze of my mates at the dock, and, hands clasped together, over the railing and into the water, laughing.

I carried her on my back when she became exhausted from swimming. And we washed up at a beach a league from the port, where no one had seen our escape. The sand was warm. The world was kind. Yggdrasil stretched up, shining, toward the sun. We trudged into the city with our whole long lives ahead of us.

I was hers and she was mine. I clothed her in the latest Neo Arcadian fashions, fed her until her cheeks were round and pink, and licked her wherever she liked.

And she—she was always _singing_.


	7. Twenty-Two

You encounter odd things in the course of life with a human. Stray toenail clippings. Stomach flu. "Fat days." Bad dreams.

And the first night she didn't come home. I paced in front of the window for hours waiting for the shadow of her lithesome silhouette to come shimmying up the alley.

When at last she appeared through the grey haze of morning, she was wearing a strange defiant look.

"Where were you?" I said, as I rushed to meet her at the door.

"With a man." She crossed her arms tightly to her chest. "Well? Aren't you angry? Jealous? Don't you wish you could hit me?"

"No... of course not!"

She bounded forward, stuck out her arms, and shoved me in the chest. "A _real_ man would."

There were, even in those days, at least half a dozen epithets she could have used to insult me. None would have hurt as much.

"What _I_ felt," I said, as I drew back from her, wounded, "was fear for you. And that I'd be lonely if you ever decided to leave me."

She stared at me for a long time, her black irises shining. Then she took a deep breath, and as she exhaled she shuddered. For me, the sight of that shudder opened up the memories of the hundreds of happy shudders I'd coaxed out of her, made me wonder if they had all been lacking. Pained me.

And then, as if in answer: "you make me feel safe, Andrew," she said. "But sometimes, I don't want to feel safe."

That day, I learned there are some things which only humans can provide for each other.

Three weeks later, she came through the door with shame-filled eyes, pressed her face into my chest, and howled.

"It's over," she said. "Over with _him_. I want to feel _safe_ again, Andrew."

"Then you came to the right place."

She laughed, crying, and I held her then, reeling with my own relief, soaking in her tears. How I wanted to understand her feelings! What she had experienced and what she had learned. What had drawn her away, and what had drawn her back. But I couldn't understand, no matter how hard I tried. She was sad. She was happy to have returned to me. I could comprehend nothing more. But it was all right: I knew sadness and happiness well enough. I held her more tightly.

If you're going to love someone different from yourself, you must love her _whole_. Not as a soul in a body, but as a body too. Not as your heart's desire parsed out from the things that confound you.

I loved _her_ , and also that which was _also_ her: that system of invisible ropes and pulleys to which she, through no conscious design of her own, was attached.

 _Also_ , all you zealous Lotharios of the Resistance, take note: if she's going to do the washing up after she's eaten, never stack her dishes. Humans hate washing the bottoms of dishes.


	8. Twenty-Five

My memory's slightly damaged, you know, but I can still feel that gentle retreat of the dough under my palms. See the clouds of flour leaping up from the table. Look how I'm rubbing my nose. The powder's tickling my olfactory sensors even now.

I set a steaming loaf of bread before her and she eats it. She eats as if it's the last meal she's ever going to have. Ferocious, with an enjoyment that's almost obscene. Hunger has left its mark on her. I wonder if she's ever going to slow down some day, to learn to take small bites, even to pick at her food like the young generation of Neo Arcadian humans born after the war. But I hope she doesn't. I like her like this, stuck in a pleasure cycle of hungry and sated. I realize I wouldn't love her as much if she were a dainty eater.

"What do you think?" I ask, wondering if the answer will be different this time. "Too salty? Too sweet? Too crumbly?"

"What are you talking about? It's wonderful. It always is." Even after six years, she hasn't yet learned to distinguish between subtle flavors and textures. Or, if she has, she refuses to admit she notices or cares. Sometimes she tells me stories of how she used to forage for dried leaves, grind them up, and mix them into a bit of cassava paste for her dinner. She says the leaves seemed to make her portion of cassava go longer. If blended skillfully enough, she wouldn't even be able to taste them. This was her idea of haute cuisine when she was twelve.

But her eyes betray her regret. She knows I can't try the bread myself. And that our livelihood depends on me baking bread I can't taste. I can't very well go back to being a sailor, now can I?

And yet baking is a science. Most of the time I manage well enough. Measure the ingredients correctly, standardize one's kneading technique, and don't let the loaf burn. Humans enjoy eating my bread. I enjoy feeding them.

But _her_... I feed _her_ _pro bono_.

"What about those bananas?" I'd asked her once. "Your leaders gave us crates loaded with them."

"Before I came here, I'd eaten exactly two bananas in my life," she'd said. "One of them was stolen, and it earned me these." She'd pointed to the pale streaks on her back. "The other one was payment, after..."

"Stop."

Painful though it was, there was more I wanted to know.

"What I meant was, why did the leaders trade those bananas away while you were going hungry?"

" _They_ weren't going hungry," she said. "They took all the best things for themselves, and left the dried leaves for us.

"Isn't it like that everywhere in the world? Everywhere, I mean, except _here._ "


	9. Imagine That!

She told me how sometimes her pulse pounded in her ears just afterwards. How from behind that percussive _whoosh_ a ringing rose up and drowned out the world.

There was what I saw, and there was what she saw. Crossing the gulf between them demanded my patience and my imagination.

What I saw: her shivering body pressed against mine. She was real. She was next to me. Her eyes were looking right at me.

What she saw: she was no one, adrift in a noisy sea of stars.

Beautiful world, seen and unseen!

* * *

That reminds me.

I said "I'm sorry" once to a ball of light hovering over her shoulder, at just one of those moments when her hearing had gone. Long ago someone had told me that at least some of those disembodied bundles of data were the spirits of dead reploids. I'd been saying "I'm sorry" to them ever since.

"I'm sorry."

"What, Andrew?"

It turns out the vast majority of humans can't see the spirits of dead reploids, or even the spirits of dead humans.

Imagine that.

* * *

That reminds me.

She told me how a man from out of town once paid for her to join him on an expedition to the interior to scavenge for valuables. By day she bore his packs and his water canteens. By night, poor girl, she bore burdens of another sort.

It was her first time to see the ruins up close. She took in all she saw with an apathy borne of lifelong humiliation. Well, _almost_ all. Half-collapsed buildings, burned-out cars, mangled human skeletons: she was nonplussed, especially by the skeletons. She'd seen plenty of corpses before.

And then they came to a field dotted with grassy mounds of various sizes on the outskirts of the city.

The grassy mounds were the remains of reploids who had perished in the last days of the Elf Wars. Unlike the dead humans, they hadn't rotted away. They had rusted and been buried by the creep of returning Nature. Here and there she saw an eye, or a finger, peeking out through the weeds.

"Damn things finally stopped killing us and started killing each other," the man explained. As a boy, he'd heard the story from his father and the _whys_ and _hows_ were hazy. "That's how the war ended. And there you have it. Good riddance."

She ran to one of the mounds and kicked it. She kicked it again. And again. All her hatred coalesced in her right foot, as if the particular lump of grass at her feet were responsible for everything wrong in her life.

If not for these reploids, the city behind her would be thriving still. She'd be living in it. There would be food, stability. Her father would never have fallen ill and died. Her mother in desperation would never have sold her.

The man stood against a wall, in the shade, laughing. She looked back. She knew he understood. In a show of magnanimity he let her have her fit. Or perhaps he thought it was entertaining. And then, when he grew bored he called her over, slapped her on the buttocks, and placed the loaded pack back onto her shoulders.

"Did you enjoy your revenge, little missy?" he said. Another laugh. "Well, better him than me."

* * *

"I never pitied them at all, Andrew," she said, referring to those mounds. "The thought of it never even crossed my mind. But _now_ , after having known _you_..." She held me, and she cried real tears.

You see, time moves in one direction only, but the heart...

Oh? I've already told you that? Well, it's _true_ , you know.

A ball of light was hovering over her shoulder. I told her so.

She turned toward the light without seeing and said, "I'm sorry."

* * *

I'm glad she didn't live long enough to see the latter days of the crisis and X's transfiguration, when those little bundles of data newly extracted from their bodies began to light up the night sky by the hundreds and thousands.

I'm glad, but only for her sake.

God knows I would have appreciated the company.


	10. Nineteen

We made our home in that beige complex which used to tower over the northern sector. Building C, on the ground floor. She liked it because it was warm, secure, and offered complete shelter from the rain. She marvelled at the way clean water came from the taps. As a native Neo Arcadian, I liked it because it was neither more nor less than what any other Neo Arcadian had. Even X was rumored to have lived in some place similar.

...Why did I say "used to tower," you ask? Because, after she and I were evicted, it was converted into a military barracks. Around the perimeter turrets went up, and barbed wire, and electrified fences. Within each apartment, where generations of families had grown, lived, aged, wept, and loved, crude cinderblock walls were erected. Units were split in two, bay windows were barred; at last each half-unit was forcibly outfitted with eight unwilling reploids.

Five years ago the squadron housed in in Building F went on strike, and so X ordered the entire complex, A to H, along with all the unhappy souls in it, to be blown to bits. So it was.

If walls could talk, I wonder what consolation they could have offered to our successors before their last panicked moments. Comfort of the past, dream of a harmonious age…

If walls could sing, even better...

And if memories could leave behind their imprints for others to see, I would have wished most for them to see the stained-glass which the beloved and I once found washed up on the beach and hung in our bay window.

A mosaic of multi-colored flowers in front of an azure sky. The piece was a rare survivor from the world before the war. We felt the waves had borne it to us directly from an idyllic past. Amazing that, while we were in Paradise, we were searching for it behind us. As if life could be any better.

The stained-glass fractured and hued the afternoon sunlight on our bedroom wall for sixty-five blissful years.

We had no notion that such little acts of beauty were a fight against the future. Her most powerful punch? The way she rose from the bed, beaded with sweat, chest heaving, transfigured into a being of colored light. Her nipples sparkled green and red. Her precious face?

Peacock blue.


	11. Forty-nine

When she cut her hair short, I found fresh pleasure in the smooth stateliness of her neck. Where once she had been sweet and soft, the years had made her hard and regal. Black became her. Her wit and her senses were sharper. She savored small things, like the way she watered the ivies hanging in our bay window. Always something in her hands. Fresh-cut flowers, cloth for a new dress, the curtains being drawn back. How I loved the decisiveness of her hands when she drew the curtains, and the relish in her face as it met the morning sun. The timbre of her voice took on keener qualities: dark, deep, full of love, full of knowing.

"People will think you're my son," she said once when we were out together. She laughed.

I grabbed her and kissed her. "No one thinks that now," I said.

It became our little joke, for a while.

She had spent thirty years singing in public parks, on street corners, on hand-built community center stages - then in concert halls, recording studios, and finally in the Metropolitan Opera. She wore her hard-won respect like an invisible crown. There was authority in her step.

But one day, I came home to find her sobbing and hugging herself on the floor.

"Oh, Andrew," she said. Her red eyes searched mine. "How can I tell you this? I made my choice… I chose _you_ , and not only once… You were good to me, and I kept on choosing _you_. I don't regret it in the slightest. And anyway, those human men... when I was young I hated them. I couldn't help it. Because before you saved me, they…"

"I know, darling."

"So I never wanted to have children… It's only that…" She looked away. "Today I realized, for certain now… that I can't change my mind even if I wanted to..."

That night after she had fallen asleep I studied her face. I couldn't deny it had changed. The little lines chiseled into the corners of her eyes and her forehead didn't spoil her beauty, nor did the few strands of stark white against her black hair. But for the first time ever they frightened me. For the first time, I saw them as portents of a future to come.

Through the last thirty years my own face in the mirror had remained the same as it was the day of my activation. Young. Handsome. Stubborn. Unyielding.

In the dark I held her more tightly than usual, as if my arms could preserve her. She moaned and wriggled away, and complained that she was hot. She offered me a hand instead, a pale substitute. Craving more, I reached down into her warm softness. Her eyes shot open.

"Andrew!"

The censure in her voice bewildered me. I shrank away.

Her eyes filled with regret. "Oh, Andrew." She reached out and cradled my face in her hand, tenderly. "I'm changing and it scares you, doesn't it?"

"Yes. Does it scare you, too?"

"I suppose."

I leaned into her touch, desperate to quell my rising panic. I had saved her, freed her, fed her, sheltered her, pleasured her, adored her. Nothing on earth could harm her, save Time. But against Time, what the hell could I do?


End file.
